The expansion of the use of the Internet Protocol (“IP”), such as through the ever increasing growth of the Internet has put a strain on the amount of device addresses available. The popular Internet Protocol v4 (“IPv4”) addressing scheme provides 32 address bits, arranged as four 8-bit segments. A more recent addressing scheme, Internet Protocol version 6 (“IPv6”), enlarges the address size to 128 bits, arranged as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits. While this increased address size allows for a vast number of addressed devices and very large networks (for instance, IPv6 supports roughly 3.4×1038 addresses) most devices at the local link edge lack the resources to support the larger address size. For example, numerous radio frequency identification (“RFID”) devices and various field deployable devices (referred to generally herein as “sensors”) may only support an 8-bit, 16-bit or 32 bit address and therefore cannot support 128-bit IPv6 addressing. The proliferation of electronic communication devices has heightened the requirements for providing unique addresses.
While other methods of addressing for such devices are being investigated, there are no methods that incorporate the ability to route data directly based on an offset bit slice of the IPv6 address. Other methods will consequently suffer from complications in data forwarding across a standard IPv6 core network, thus requiring tunneling and/or address translation, which do not provide true end-to-end connectivity and cannot participate in some internet protocols. As such, simply writing software for execution by the general purpose CPU in forwarding devices is not practical.
What is desired is an arrangement under which existing sensor devices can be utilized to support IPv6 routing without requiring the sensors to support a full 128 bit address.